Cuban-American Literature and Art: Negotiating Identities

by Isabel Alvarez Borland (Editor), Lynette M. F. Bosch (Editor)

Overview

This groundbreaking collection offers an understanding of why Cuban-American literature and visual art have emerged in the United States and how they are so essentially linked to both Cuban and American cultures. The contributors explore crucial issues pertinent not only to Cuban-American cultural production but also to other immigrant groups—hybrid identities, biculturation, bilingualism, immigration, adaptation, and exile. The complex ways in which Cuban Americans have been able to keep a living memory of Cuba while developing and thriving in America are both intriguing and instructive. These essays, written from a variety of perspectives, range from useful overviews of fictional and visual works of art to close readings of individual texts.

Product Details

ISBN-13:	9780791493724
Publisher:	State University of New York Press
Publication date:	01/26/2009
Series:	SUNY series in Latin American and Iberian Thought and Culture
Sold by:	Barnes & Noble
Format:	eBook
Pages:	234
File size:	402 KB

About the Author

Isabel Alvarez Borland is Monsignor Edward G. Murray Professor of Arts and Humanities at the College of the Holy Cross and author of Cuban-American Literature of Exile: From Person to Persona. Lynette M. F. Bosch is Professor of Art History at State University of New York College at Geneseo and author of Cuban-American Art in Miami: Exile, Identity and the Neo-Baroque. Together, they are the coeditors (with Jorge J. E. Gracia) of Identity, Memory, and Diaspora: Voices of Cuban-American Artists, Writers, and Philosophers, also published by SUNY Press.

Table of Contents

Acknowledgments

Introduction
Isabel Alvarez Borland and Lynette M. F. Bosch

Part One•The Literature

1. The Spell of the Hyphen
Gustavo Pérez Firmat

2. Figures of Identity: Ana Menéndez’s and Guillermo Cabrera Infante’s Photographs
Isabel Alvarez Borland

3. Engendering the Nation: The Mother/Daughter Plot in Cuban American Fiction
Adriana Méndez Rodenas

4. Reading Lives in Installments: Autobiographical Essays of Women from the Cuban Diaspora
Iraida H. López

5. Am I your worst nightmare? Reading Roberto G. Fernández’s Major Fictions
Jorge Febles

6. Exile, Memories, and Identities in Gustavo Pérez Firmat’s Next Year in Cuba
William Luis

7. Writing in Cuban, Living as Other: Cuban American Women Writers Getting It Right
Eliana Rivero

Part Two•The Art

8. From the Vanguardia to the United States: Cuban and Cuban American Identity in the Visual Arts
Lynette M. F. Bosch

9. Challenging Orthodoxies: Cuban American Art and Postmodernist Criticism
Mark E. Denaci

10. Cuban Artists and the Irony of Exile
Carol Damian

11. Cuban American Identity and Art
Jorge J. E. Gracia

12. Cuban Art in the Diaspora
Andrea O’Reilly Herrera

About the Editors
About the Contributors
Index

Editorial Reviews

"Addressing multiple issues pertaining to Cubanness within US mainstream society, these essays offer a comprehensive survey of representative Cuban American authors, most of whom write in English, and artists." — CHOICE

From the Publisher